


Overwhelming Questions

by RowboatCop



Category: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (TV)
Genre: Canon Disabled Character, Day 2, F/M, blatant prufrock crap, coulson's fourth hand, maudlin coulson, phil coulson is an unreliable narrator, skoulsonfest2k16, with apologies to t.s. eliot
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-02-02
Updated: 2016-02-02
Packaged: 2018-05-17 20:54:01
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,750
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5884822
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/RowboatCop/pseuds/RowboatCop
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In which Coulson doesn't dare disturb the universe.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Overwhelming Questions

**zero**

He can be forgiven for being morose, he decides at some point when he’s still lying in the medical gurney after the third surgery on his arm to clean up the damage from Mack’s ax.

Eventually, he’ll get over it, he knows he will. He’s alive, after all.

But for now, he wants to wallow in it. There’s a perverse kind of pleasure in such wallowing, in _deciding_ to wallow, in knowing that there will be time for what comes after but that time is not now.

As though he can set some kind of imposed limit on his own depression.

Skye comes, though, and sits by his bed, and she makes it hard to wallow.

He _almost_ regrets her presence.

After all, what right does he have to feel depressed when her whole world has been created and then burned around her, when she’s found her family and then lost it again.

But of course, he can never really regret her presence. Especially not when she pulls her chair up close and wallows with him, like maybe this is what they both need now, and there will be time.

“Daisy Johnson,” she tells him amongst a lot of other things that don’t stick in his drug-addled mind, but _this_ does. “That’s my name. Or...it should have been.”

“Daisy Johnson,” he repeats. The name of someone he doesn’t know, the name of someone he never would have met.

Daisy Johnson.

He wonders if she’ll take the name, if that will help her hold onto some part of what she’s lost, to the parents that loved her once, to the life she could have had.

He wonders if she’d rather have had that life instead of this one.

(He wonders what a miserable asshole he is that he cringes at the idea that she might prefer that nice life instead of this one. That she might prefer a life where they never met.)

Then she goes, goes to see to other things, and he misses her. He misses her, and all he can think on is the feeling of chasing after her forever, of feeling incomplete without her beside him, of getting her back only to have her slip away anyways.

It’s not an unfamiliar feeling — the draw towards her, the way he wants her — but it’s not one he’s ever been comfortable naming when it applies to Skye, until now. Now, lying in his bed, thinking about her and how lost he would be without her, he can’t _not_ name it.

But to call it love, to tell himself without a doubt that _he is in love with Skye_ is just painful. After all, naming it means nothing if he can’t act on it, and he can’t, not ever.

All he can think about is the way she would look at him — at his broken body and his thinning hair — if she ever knew. And he doesn’t want her pity.

 

**one**

Skye’s sitting beside his bed when he first opens his eyes, first stretches the prosthesis.

“Hi.” Her voice is soft, maybe sleepy, and he turns his head on his pillow to look at her.

And it’s not like she’s been a stranger these last few weeks. She’s been with him, probably been with him too much while he’s been etherized in hospital beds, sitting by his side. Still, he gazes at her like he hasn’t seen her in forever, like all he ever really wants to do is gaze at her.

“Hi.”

Her eyes are directed at his left hand, so he looks down, too, at the silver hand attached to his left arm.

“How’s it feel?”

He stretches the hand — and it will take him a little while to be comfortable thinking about it as _his_ hand — and draws it up so he can see it. Not that he hadn’t spent plenty of time going over the specs before it was attached, but it’s different when it’s attached to him.

“Fine.”

_Strange_ would be a better answer. But there’s not much pain, so he has no room to complain.

“Good.”

“How long was I out?”

“They finished about three hours ago.”

“You haven’t been sitting here all that time, have you?”

She smiles, maybe a little embarrassed, and he’s basically an asshole for loving the idea of Skye sitting by his bed while he sleeps, of Skye wasting her life here with him.

It’s fake, of course. He knows that Skye is only wasting her time by his hospital bed because she feels some misplaced sense of responsibility, like she’s somehow to blame for the series of events her mother set in motion, the series of events that Hydra set in motion.

He likes the lie, though, where she sits with him because she wants to be near him as much as he wants to be near her.

“It gave me some time to think.”

And god, but he wants to touch her with his newly minted left hand, wants to feel whatever he can of her under his new fingertips. He doesn’t, of course. Mostly, when he’s not shaking off the effects of anesthesia, he’s learned not to consciously want it at all.

“What about?”

Skye shrugs, somewhere between noncommittal and embarrassed, and Coulson lets it go.

There’s been too much time to think lately, and he’s not sure it’s not doing him much good.

 

**two**

“I wish you had told me it was hurting you so much.”

She shifts next to him where they sit as Fitz and Bobbi are making some kind of final adjustments to a new hand prototype.

“I didn’t want to bother you with it,” he tells her, voice quiet. There are people around them in the lab, and he’s uncomfortable with the idea that they might know about his pain, might see past the brave face.

He doesn’t mind people knowing he’s human, he doesn’t mean to put on a macho act because he’s not that — macho. But he _does_ mind people worrying on him when they have better things to occupy their thoughts.

“Sure.”

She sounds like she doesn’t believe him — like she thinks he _wants_ to hide from her — but it’s the truth. He doesn’t want to burden her with this, with his personal struggles, with something she’s tempted to feel responsible for, but maybe she’d prefer it, maybe it would make her feel better to hear it.

(She had told him once that he had to _bring her in_ , no exceptions.)

“Skye —”

She raises her eyebrows at him.

“Daisy.” _Daisy Daisy Daisy_ , the name of someone he never would have met.

“Yes?”

She smiles, and he just wants to tell her everything — _everything_.

As though that’s possible.

It’s sort of funny that his most prevalent thought is that everything he feels for her is _terribly_ inconvenient.

And it’s not the kind of thing he has experienced before, all tangled up in questionable SHIELD protocols.

The closest he’s ever come is probably Comandante Reyes, and even that was too different to be comparable. Because of course he had fucked Camilla in their time together — most of it was spent in the back of a sweaty van, she had been direct, and he’s not made of stone. It was bound to happen, maybe even an inevitability, but it stayed there, soaked into that hideous orange shag carpet.

His feelings for her were mostly fondness and lust, nothing like what he feels for _Daisy_.

The only souvenir he carried away from his time with Camilla was the rug burn on his back, and the fact that it’s already worse than that with Daisy is enough to terrify him.

Because entanglements — real ones, deep ones, messy ones — are not things that Phil Coulson does. They’ve _never_ been something that Phil Coulson does, not since he became an Agent, not since he learned how much safer it is to compartmentalize things..

Phil Coulson plays a little goofy; Phil Coulson makes sure that his acquaintances don’t think of him as a threat.

Phil Coulson keeps himself separate — aloof — and measures his life out not in deep, fulfilling relationships but in cups of coffee, meals at Zagat-rated restaurants. He has doled himself out in spoonfuls, rarely given anyone more.

Then he got stabbed through the heart by an Asgardian.

Then he met _her_.

And the two events are connected — not causally, of course, but in a real way because he thinks that had he met _her_ before his heart had been ripped apart and regrown, he might have never given her more than a spoonful of himself.

Which, in all likelihood, would have been so much more convenient.

“Nothing.”

 

**three**

“How’s it feel?”

She drops into the seat next to him as Fitz wanders away — distracted as ever, not that Coulson blames him.

Coulson clenches his hand into a fist and then releases it, watches the way his fingers respond to what he wants them to do.

“Better.”

“Yeah?”

She sounds hopeful, and he wants to give her this — hope that he’ll be okay, that this will work out, that he can be normal.

“Yeah,” he nods.

It’s not a lie. It is better. The fine control is better, the response is better. It’s just that it still feels wrong, but maybe he’s adjusting himself to the idea that it will _always_ feel wrong.

Sk-Daisy smiles at him, though — with her mouth and her eyes and her face — and he wants to give this to her, he wants her to never frown because of him, he wants her to never feel responsible for the lingering pain.

“You cut your hair,” he tells her, his obvious asinine comment of the day, but she cut her hair so that it falls above her shoulders, so that it frames her face somehow better than before.

“Yeah, I…” She smiles awkwardly. “I thought a change might be nice. Do you —”

“You look great,” he cuts her off.

“Yeah?”

She shakes her shorter hair out and sort of poses for him, silly like she thinks she could never really be a model. But she’s gorgeous, the kind of gorgeous that takes his breath away, the kind of gorgeous he’s gotten good at not noticing until she does something inconsiderate and horrible like cut her hair and force him to look at her anew.

“Beautiful,” he tells her, and he means it too much, his voice almost cracks on the word. It’s too fucking honest, and sometimes he wishes he could blame her for making him feel like such a fool.

“Thanks,” she whispers, and her fingers slide over his new left hand, brushing against it as she looks up at him through her eyelashes, like she’s checking to make sure this is okay. He wishes he could feel it, hates himself for wishing that so hard.

But sometimes she looks at him — like this, like she is right now — and he can almost imagine daring to tell her, daring to gather his strength into a ball and roll it toward…

Daisy clears her throat and pulls her hand back, as though she could tell what he was thinking, as though she was sparing him the embarrassment of telling him that he’s misread her, misread the situation.

“You want to do something in the field?” She asks him because of course she was thinking about _this_ and not the other thing. He nods easily. “I have an idea about how to catch up with these black ops guys.”

“Yeah,” he answers.

And this is what he needs — more work to throw himself into, more to do to take his mind off of her.

There’s been too much time for thinking lately, and he’s quite sure it’s not done him any good.

 

**four**

He waits for weeks and weeks afterwards to see Fitz about replacing his hand.

Part of it is that he doesn’t want to see Fitz, if he’s being honest. Something about Fitz’s face takes Coulson back to that feeling, that feeling of ending a man’s life, that feeling of ribs snapping and breath vanishing.

Part of it is that he knows that another hand will just make him think about it. About Rosalind who didn’t deserve to die and Ward who did, about how he still feels guilt for both of their deaths, about how he still grieves for both of them in a way he doesn’t understand.

And he’s not so bad at going without, had gotten pretty good at it in the weeks before he got the first prosthetic.

So when he goes to get the new one, it’s an act of closure, of moving forward, moving on.

“I was wondering when you’d do it.”

Daisy sits down beside him while the lab tech is fiddling with the new hand across the room, and he smiles at her.

He’s been trying to keep his distance from her — in truth, he was doing that before everything happened with the ATCU — but it’s like she’s pretending he’s not. She still invites herself into his new office, she still greets him quietly — never forcing herself into his life, never forcing more than he can handle, but always there just the same.

Sometimes he wonders if she can tell how much he appreciates it, how much her presence means to him. He should tell her, he knows, but he’s not sure how to do that without telling her too much.

“I just needed time.”

“Then it’s good you took it.”

He nods.

“I know you...cared about her. About Rosalind.” She’s hesitant but sure, like she’s finally decided to force the issue after weeks of being gentle with him. And, well, it doesn’t seem like the worst thing to talk to her, to Daisy who keeps staying by his side, to Daisy who seems to understand what he needs better than he does.

“I’m not sure it had gotten that far. I was forcing myself _not_ to care about her, and then it was just a couple of days…”

“You say that like you can’t care about someone in just a couple of days.”

There’s something so meaningful, so big, shining in her eyes and he remembers his first couple of days with _her_ , with the mysterious beautiful hacker who was just so...good.

“Yeah,” his lips curl into a smile around the word. “But it wasn’t even...it wasn’t even her. I think that’s what I feel worst about.”

“That you’re mourning the potential for something, instead of...her?”

“I had given up on that potential. Even before _this_ ,” he raises his left arm, the stump with no hand attached, “I had…”

Before Rosalind, he had resigned himself to something hopeless and sad and one-sided, and maybe for one minute he thought there could be something else.

“I hope you don’t give up on that potential again.”

“It seems like the universe is telling me that I should. When I get too close to someone —”

“That wasn’t the _universe_ , Coulson, it was Ward. And it was awful. But you closing yourself off, giving up on that? That’s letting Ward win.”

He can’t help the smile at that, at her earnest face and her big eyes, and sometimes when she looks at him the hopeless sad love carries for her rushes back to the surface.

Coulson swallows.

“Where’s Campbell?”

Daisy looks surprised by that question, and her eyes drop down to her lap.

“I’m not sure Lincoln’s gonna stick around.”

“I thought you two were —”

“Maybe, with him, it was more about...that potential. Something I thought I couldn’t have.”

“Something you couldn’t have? That’s ridiculous.”

“Is it? Every time I feel like I’ve found something good, it...disappears.”

“I’m still here,” he blurts out, as though he’s earned any sort of right to be considered _something good_ in her life.

“Yeah,” she answers, and her left hand slides over his right, skin on skin. “You are.”

Their eyes meet, and he can see it there — the way that Daisy is struggling with something so familiar.

He’s surprised — shocked — when she leans forward to press her lips against his, and it’s suddenly there between them, this overwhelming question that he’s always just assumed was his own burden.

“Oh,” he whispers against her mouth.

She pulls back, just enough that she can see into his eyes, just enough that he can also see the question in her expression.

And he’d never have dared to ask, but he knows his answer.


End file.
